Topic
System Design interview questions
1311 System Design questions from 230 companies, with hints, runnable code and solution walkthroughs.
60 easy819 medium432 hard
System Design interview questions by the numbers
Last updated
Katkat has 1,311 System Design interview questions from 230 companies; the most come from OpenAI (8%), Meta (5%) and Amazon (4%). By difficulty: 5% easy, 62% medium and 33% hard. The most common round is Onsite (55%). Frequent concepts include System Design, Distributed Systems, Scalability and Caching.
Companies (230)
Difficulty
- Easy5% · 60
- Medium62% · 819
- Hard33% · 432
Interview rounds
- Onsite55% · 721
- Technical Screen39% · 517
- Online Assessment3% · 38
- Other2% · 21
- HR Screen1% · 13
Roles
- Software Engineer91% · 1189
- Machine Learning Engineer2% · 31
- Data Engineer2% · 26
- Backend Engineer2% · 25
- Frontend Engineer1% · 19
Frequent concepts
- System Design31% · 400
- Distributed Systems24% · 316
- Scalability15% · 196
- Caching7% · 95
- Concurrency7% · 91
- system-design6% · 83
Most mentioned in interview experiences
- 1.Design delivery driver payment system3 reports
- 2.Debug round-robin request router2 reports
- 3.Design a basic bank system API2 reports
- 4.Design a delivery cost system2 reports
- 5.Design a Distributed Key-Value Store for a Small Company's Internal Use2 reports
- 6.Design a Donation System for a Three-Day Fundraising Campaign2 reports
- 7.Design a file search module like UNIX find2 reports
- 8.Design a Food Review System for a Delivery App, Focused on the Database Schema2 reports
- 9.Design a Job Scheduler for ML Training and Batch Inference on a Shared Cluster2 reports
- 10.Design a Menu Item Review and Rating System for a Food-Delivery Platform2 reports
Counted from 393 candidate interview experiences on Katkat. How we collect and count
Showing 301–330 of 1311 results
This interview question evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Design a Cryptocurrency Trading System with Third-Party Exchanges states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteDesign a high-throughput, low-latency price ingestion and distribution service that normalizes multi-exchange market data, reconciles conflicting ticks, and delivers live prices to internal services and retail clients.
CoinbaseBackend EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteA complete take-home system-design walkthrough for a bank account ledger service: APIs and data model, an immutable double-entry ledger for auditability, ACID single-account updates and atomic multi-account transfers, idempotency and exactly-once effects, concurrency control, real-time/as-of/historical balance reads, monthly statements, reconciliation with external payment rails, limits, fraud and dispute handling, plus sharding, replicas, recovery, and monitoring strategies for scale.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline AssessmentThis question evaluates understanding of transactional system design, data modeling for financial domains, API design, idempotency, concurrency control, immutable audit trails, and security considerations in an online banking context.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis question evaluates system design and distributed storage competencies, focusing on durability, replication, metadata management, consistency, and trade-offs under resource-constrained, high-latency conditions; it is in the System Design category and tests knowledge across distributed systems, storage architecture, and networking.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical ScreenThis question evaluates frontend system architecture skills for real-time trading applications, covering framework and tooling choices, state and data layers, WebSocket-driven real-time updates, responsive and accessible UI design, performance optimization, testing, and security; it is in the System Design (frontend) domain.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis problem tests your ability to design a distributed, real-time logistics platform, focusing on high-concurrency order placement, real-time courier tracking, and transactional integrity during payment and dispatch.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical ScreenDesign cloud storage system evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline AssessmentThis question tests the ability to design a scalable, consistent pagination system for high-throughput transactional data, focusing on the trade-offs between offset-based and cursor-based approaches.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis question tests your ability to design a high-throughput, low-latency streaming architecture capable of processing volatile financial data and pushing updates to millions of concurrent users.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis question evaluates system-design competency in building low-latency, high-throughput real-time streaming systems, covering ingestion, normalization, deduplication, aggregation, pub/sub dissemination, and operational resilience.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteA Coinbase software-engineering take-home: design a scheduled payments service that creates, lists, updates, executes, and cancels future-dated one-time and recurring transfers with exactly-once ledger correctness. It tests distributed-systems architecture, idempotent REST/gRPC API design, data modeling, concurrency control, DST handling, retries/backoff, outage backfill, and observability. The model answer pins correctness on a single-writer state machine plus an idempotent ledger.
CoinbaseSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline AssessmentDesign a monthly artist-payout system that turns valid streaming events into reproducible obligations and idempotent external payments. The answer covers event deduplication, period closure, payout versions, timeout ambiguity, outbox delivery, provider reconciliation, late adjustments, and auditable financial state.
CommureSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical ScreenThis question tests the ability to design a dual-purpose system that handles high-throughput asynchronous feed ingestion and transient, short-lived email alias management.
ConfluentSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis question evaluates a candidate's proficiency in large-scale system design, including distributed ingestion and deduplication, content ranking, API design choices (REST versus RPC), pagination and caching strategies, and techniques for generating and ensuring uniqueness of human-looking disposable email addresses.
ConfluentSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteA system design question about a podcast platform where creators publish episodes and followers see them in a feed. It covers the upload and processing path for audio, building each listener's feed of new episodes, and serving shows whose audiences range from a handful of listeners to millions.
ConfluentSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteDesign a distributed key-value store at scale evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
ConfluentSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical ScreenThis question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, highly available, and privacy-focused email ingestion systems, probing competencies in distributed systems, networking (SMTP/MX), storage lifecycle management, rate limiting, security/privacy, and observability.
ConfluentSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical ScreenThis question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable RSS news feed service, emphasizing system architecture, relational schema and API design, including database table and index planning, ingestion and serving paths, deduplication/idempotency, and feed generation trade-offs.
ConfluentSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis question tests the ability to design a distributed system that orchestrates machine reboots while maintaining cluster capacity, service availability, and operational safety.
CoreweaveSite Reliability EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteDesign a distributed workflow allocation platform that routes tasks to human operators, tracks execution state via leases, and ensures fair queueing and fault tolerance.
CoreweaveSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteSystem design question for a notification system that must absorb bursty traffic of about one million writes per second. It covers requirements and capacity estimates, a queue-buffered write path, why a log-structured store such as Cassandra writes quickly, channel delivery and deduplication.
CoreweaveSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteSystem design question about the database between an OS validation service that writes results and a fleet management service that reads them, with strong consistency required. It probes primary and replica failures, synchronous versus asynchronous replication, failover, two-phase commit and consensus.
CoreweaveSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteDesign a globally distributed synthetic website monitoring service that executes periodic health probes, mitigates false-positive alerts, and ingests high-volume time-series metrics.
CoreweaveSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis question evaluates a candidate's competency in PKI architecture, cryptographic key management, certificate lifecycle (issuance, renewal, revocation), and operational security for internal mTLS and related signing use cases.
CoupangSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis question evaluates understanding of Identity and Access Management concepts including authentication and authorization flows, role- and policy-based permissions, temporary credential handling, multi-tenant access control, auditing, and scalability considerations.
CoupangSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteThis question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable large-file upload subsystems, testing competencies in distributed storage, resumable transfers, data integrity, processing pipelines, security, and observability.
CoupangSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsiteExplain how to take a successful proof of concept into production, including the engineering and operational gaps that must be closed.
CrestaSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical ScreenDesign a real-time event messaging platform as a take-home assignment where security and availability come first, then defend it in a live review. It tests durable partitioned delivery, authentication and tenant isolation, multi-zone and regional failover, and the ability to weigh reviewer suggestions and adapt to changed requirements.
CrowdstrikeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTake-home ProjectThis problem tests your ability to design a distributed, asynchronous system that handles high-throughput file uploads, coordinates multi-engine security scanning, and provides reporting capabilities.
CrowdstrikeSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite